From: Asmus Freytag (asmusf@ix.netcom.com)
Date: Sun Apr 19 2009 - 14:11:31 CDT
On] 4/19/2009 8:53 AM, Doug Ewell wrote:
> Peter, would it be fair to say that glyphs in the Wingdings font
> family are "mapped to 16-bit values that correspond to Unicode PUA
> code points?" Would that be more acceptable than saying they are
> mapped to the PUA?
>
All I can contribute to this is the historical information that the
original designers of this were fully aware of the Unicode private use
area.
On 4/19/2009 9:29 AM, Christopher Fynn wrote:
> The font does also contain an additional piece of information, the
> "Microsoft Character Set" field has a value meaning "Symbol" - As far
> as I can tell this is what effectively tells Windows to map the (PUA
> encoded) symbol characters in the font to the 8-bit character set when
> Wingdings font is selected. However nowhere in the font itself are the
> glyphs mapped to ASCII or "Windows ANSI" characters. The CMAP table
> contains Unicode PUA character values.
This feature was designed at a time when only Windows NT actually
supported Unicode, but no major applications did. Therefore, the new OS
had to make sure that access to the font could continue to rely on 8-bit
character codes.
On 4/19/2009 6:27 AM, David Starner wrote:
> The font's just a blob of bytes until given form and meaning by the OS, and Windows interprets it in many cases with an ASCII encoding.
>
That describes it rather well. The vast majority of applications rely on
the rasterizer in the OS, the layout engine in the OS, or even the text
widget in the OS. Windows does provide access to the font's bytes, and
those few applications that access the raw font would have to emulate
Windows' behavior.
On 4/19/2009 8:47 AM, Doug Ewell wrote:
> Roozbeh Pournader <roozbeh at htpassport dot com> wrote:
>
>> So that's the reason I see all those capitals J's in emails! Do you
>> know who I can lobby to get MS Outlook to use a proper U+263A instead
>> of the "J" when sending emails?
>
> If the remainder of the Wingdings set were encoded in Unicode, this
> could be done uniformly for all Wingdings, not just WHITE SMILING
> FACE....
Doug, we are all waiting for your actual proposal to encode these as
legacy! You've hinted at your interest in doing one. When will we see it?
A./
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